Holder messes with Texas

Monday

Jul 29, 2013 at 6:00 AM

Clive McFarlane

Last month, the U. S. Supreme Court eviscerated the 1965 Voting Rights Act by removing a key provision requiring states known for their discriminatory actions against minority voters to seek approval from the Department of Justice before changing their voting laws.

In her scorching dissent to the majority decision, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said Congress, which is charged with enforcing the law, should be the one deciding whether it is still necessary.

Congress remains free to right the wrong of the majority decision by fashioning a new formula, or coverage provision, to identify states that would need the permission of the federal government before they can change their voting laws. But given the right-wing extremists controlling the House of Representatives, such a formula is unlikely to materialize any time soon.

The Obama administration, which often has been criticized for being too timid in the face of right-wing extremism, has, however, decided to play hardball in this case by taking on one of the biggest voting rights abusers — Texas.

Employing a heretofore seldom-used section of the Voting Rights Act, Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. last week said he intends to use the courts to force Texas back into preclearance status on voting law changes.

Instead of a coverage provision that oversees a group of states, Mr. Holder is using a "bail-in" provision in the Voting Rights Act that allows the Justice Department to impose preclearance status on states with documented voting rights violations.

You don't need to dig too deep to document the voting rights abuses in Texas. In fact, you don't need to dig at all. The state has a long history of denying the vote to African-Americans and other minorities, and it wears its history like a badge of honor.

In 1927 it passed a law banning black voters from participating in primary elections. It was ruled unconstitutional, but that didn't stop the state from twice enacting variants of the all-white primary law, in 1944 and 1953.

In 2004, two black students from Waller County, Texas, were threatened with prosecution from the county when they announced their intention to run for office. In 2006, the Supreme Court ordered a congressional Texas district to redraw its lines after finding that district had redrawn the lines to reduce the strength of Latino voters.

The court, as Justice Ginsburg pointed out in her dissent, noted that the attempt to reduce Latino voting strength bore "the mark of intentional discrimination that could give rise to an equal protection violation."

Last year, as part of a wave of voter ID laws that were being proposed and implemented across the country, Texas tried to implement a version that the courts blocked, ruling that it would impose "strict, unforgiving burdens on the poor."

But shortly after the Supreme Court struck down the coverage provision in the Voting Rights Act, Texas adopted the ID law.

Given Texas' full-court press to disenfranchise minority voters (and there are a number of other states with similar goals), one wonders just what the majority on the Supreme Court was thinking when they gutted the Voting Rights Act.

The "sad irony" of that decision, according to Justice Ginsburg, was "its utter failure to grasp why the VRA has proven effective." Throwing out the preclearance provision of the VRA, she wrote, is like "throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet."

The sad irony now is that it is the courts being asked to the rescue the VRA while Congress, the rightful enforcer of the law, stands impotently on the sidelines.